Digitalversus published an interesting interview with the designers behind the Leica Q (Typ 116) camera. Some interesting points:
- Leica Q is entirely assembled in Wetzlar, Germany
- The Leica X is pre-assembled in Asia, the final adjustments and quality checks are performed in Wetzlar.
- The sensor in the Leica Q has no low-pass filter and is neither from Sony nor from CMOSIS/STMicro
- Leica has been talking with Samsung for a while, “but the mood in the room soon changed and we had to abandon this line of enquiry“.
- Leica recommends to deactivate the OIS optical stabilization in order to get the best from the German-assembled lens and obviously a better battery life
- The Maestro II processor inside the Leica Q is produced by SocioNext – a new company owned by Fujitsu, the Development Bank of Japan and Panasonic. This processor is based on Fujitsu’s Mibeault architecture which can be also found in Nikon’s cameras.
- If there is enough interest, Leica may consider producing Leica Q cameras in the future with 35mm and 50mm lenses.
- The Leica Q is designed to record 4k video and everything is in place to enable this feature once the engineers solve the problems with overheating.
And finally, an interesting note – the 25 years old Vincent Säll who designed the Leica X3 concept camera back in 2013 is now working for Leica as an industrial designer.
